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New Monk bio in progress by Robin Kelley


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I realize this is nitpicking, but it's a significant nit - reading the notes this morning that Kelley wrote as part of the Monk/Trane at Carnegie Hall set, I note that Kelley makes a very obvious musical/technical mistake (he confuses a major and minor third). And his musical comments are pretty shallow in these notes ("one of the most important ensembles of the 1950s, if not the century"). I worry about such things, as cheerleading does not make good biography (though it does help to buy the family's cooperation).

I will keep an open mind however -

Larry, what's the latest on the Pullman Bud bio? I need some relief from PHDs -

Pullman's terrific Bud bio seems to be getting very close to lift off; just got an indication from him of that a few weeks ago. Perhaps the advent of the Kelley Monk bio will light a fire under Pullman's publisher, a very good university press whose approval procedures for manuscripts (unfortunately for Pullman and for us) would do credit to the Knights Templar crossed with a taffy factory.

About the Kelley Monk bio, I noticed that the four blurbs for it on Amazon are from two musicians (Chick Corea and Geri Allen), a scholar whose specialty is black political and social/cultural history but not music (David Levering Davis), and a New Jazz Studies figure from Columbia (Farah Jasmine Griffin). Nothing from anyone who would be regarded as a notable figure in the world of jazz scholarship. But the proof is in the reading.

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Well, a good friend of his told me that Kelley has been taking piano lessons from Randy Weston, and that Weston has guided him in the musicology aspects of the book a bit. I thought that was pretty cool. Kelley is particularly strong at articulating the intersections of culture and politics through history, and I'm more interested in that than a purely musical analysis of Monk. That's just me, personally, though. I understand where people are coming from wanting something different, though. I anticipate that everyone will be pleased because I have heard that Kelley was especially conscious of that for this book. He's a great scholar; he's one of the best today.

For folks in the Bay Area, it might be worth checking out his reading at City Lights at the end of October.

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About the arts and academia (in its American form in particular), Allen for one may dig this quote from our old pal Theodor Adorno, which I admit may not be easy to disentangle but seems to me to be worth the trouble:

"Obviously it is very difficult in America ... to comprehend the notion of the objectivity of anything intellectual. The intellect is unconditionally equated with the subject who bears it, without any recognition of its independence and autonomy. Above all, organized scholarship scarcely realizes to how small a degree works of art can be understood in terms of the mentality of those who produce them."

Can't be sure, but I would guess that what the translator renders as "mentality" might be better understood in American English as "personality." Adorno is in part talking about the assumption that information about the artist's personal makeup will fairly directly and reliably yield information about his or her artistic intentions, methods, thinking, etc. -- and vice versa, of course.

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About the arts and academia (in its American form in particular), Allen for one may dig this quote from our old pal Theodor Adorno, which I admit may not be easy to disentangle but seems to me to be worth the trouble:

"Obviously it is very difficult in America ... to comprehend the notion of the objectivity of anything intellectual. The intellect is unconditionally equated with the subject who bears it, without any recognition of its independence and autonomy. Above all, organized scholarship scarcely realizes to how small a degree works of art can be understood in terms of the mentality of those who produce them."

Can't be sure, but I would guess that what the translator renders as "mentality" might be better understood in American English as "personality." Adorno is in part talking about the assumption that information about the artist's personal makeup will fairly directly and reliably yield information about his or her artistic intentions, methods, thinking, etc. -- and vice versa, of course.

Yes, but that's a charge more properly levelled at the trad (i.e. non-'New') jazz scholarship that you laud above to the exclusion of more socio-cultural angled work!

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About the arts and academia (in its American form in particular), Allen for one may dig this quote from our old pal Theodor Adorno, which I admit may not be easy to disentangle but seems to me to be worth the trouble:

"Obviously it is very difficult in America ... to comprehend the notion of the objectivity of anything intellectual. The intellect is unconditionally equated with the subject who bears it, without any recognition of its independence and autonomy. Above all, organized scholarship scarcely realizes to how small a degree works of art can be understood in terms of the mentality of those who produce them."

Can't be sure, but I would guess that what the translator renders as "mentality" might be better understood in American English as "personality." Adorno is in part talking about the assumption that information about the artist's personal makeup will fairly directly and reliably yield information about his or her artistic intentions, methods, thinking, etc. -- and vice versa, of course.

Yes, but that's a charge more properly levelled at the trad (i.e. non-'New') jazz scholarship that you laud above to the exclusion of more socio-cultural angled work!

I don't see how you reach that conclusion. Certainly trad jazz scholarship was/is not without it flaws (these IMO mostly the result of the individual scholar or scholar-critic having less skill or information to work with than one might wish rather than being the result of methodological errors or prejudices). But what I see in much of the more socio-cultural angled work of the New Jazz Scholarship (often in the name of correcting the supposed methodological errors and prejudices of the past) is a lot of fairly blatant power-accumulating operations -- for their own sweet sake and also to nail down what look like to me like P.C. conclusions that have been reached up front. Further, and most important to the point Adorno was making and that you raise, the NJS exhibits little or no humility in the face of the art work itself (seldom, in fact, talks about music in musical terms), because said music is, from the NJS perspective, almost entirely "evidence" of the so readily decodable (by the right NJS guru) effects of social context (which is what the NJS cares most about anyhow -- and even there, as I've said above, I mistrust their motives). In any case, under such conditions, the "independence and autonomy" of the work that Adorno speaks of would seem to be far more out of reach than it ever was before.

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though I do have nice hopes for the Monk bio, Adorno's (and Larry's) complaint fits almost all academic work I have read in the last 10 years, sad to say (notable exceptions: John Szwed and Lewis Porter). I'm always interested in the life of the musician, and often it does help me see the music more clearly, but not in the way that academics seem to picture such things, as large and rationally observable social forces.

let me quote from the notes to my upcoming blues set:

  • Travelin' Light Billie Holiday 6/12/42 Travelin' white? One academic writer, and I kid you not, has used the evidence of Holiday's expressed pleasure at recording with the Whiteman band on this West Coast trip as evidence of her shame at her own blackness. It seems that Billie tried rehearsing, shortly after this session, with a black band that was more on the roughhouse side, and then informed its members that they suffered in comparison to Whiteman. Sherrie Tucker, in her book Swing Shift, seizes upon this incident as reflecting not just a lack of racial pride and/or awareness on Holiday's part, but also abject personal shame at her own skin color. This is a complete perversion of the truth, and ignores the reality of Holiday's own oft-expressed aesthetic ideas. She simply preferred the softer dynamics of certain musicians and groups, in the same way that she preferred the (white) pianist Jimmy Rowles over (the black pianist) Oscar Peterson. Not to mention that this near-blue ballad is a thing of beauty, and that beauty, to quote Ornette Coleman, is a rare thing. Damn the ideologues -

Edited by AllenLowe
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I agree that it reads to me like a complaint against intentional fallacy. And I don't disagree with many of your points about the NJS. But that kind of intentionally fallacious thinking - 'clearly in this piece he wanted to convey the pain of closing his mother' - is a cornerstone of trad jazz studies (not necessarily to the exclusion of the new stuff, granted!) ... examples later ...

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I agree that it reads to me like a complaint against intentional fallacy. And I don't disagree with many of your points about the NJS. But that kind of intentionally fallacious thinking - 'clearly in this piece he wanted to convey the pain of closing his mother' - is a cornerstone of trad jazz studies (not necessarily to the exclusion of the new stuff, granted!) ... examples later ...

Well, "closing [your] mother" would be painful. Sorry -- couldn't resist. :D

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Adorno, himself, was able to write Dialectic of the Enlightenment but also Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, both quite successfully. I don't see that being much different from Robin Kelley writing Freedom Dreams and then this Monk bio.

I don't follow you. Adorno, like him or not (and I sure have mixed feelings), was able in part (if you believe what he says) to write what he did in this sphere because he became quite aware of and resisted the positivist habits that he describes here as being typical of American academia in the late 1930s/early 1940s, when he was in direct contact with it:

"The intellect is unconditionally equated with the subject who bears it, without any recognition of its independence and autonomy. Above all, organized scholarship scarcely realizes to how small a degree works of art can be understood in terms of the mentality of those who produce them."

If you mean that Robin Kelley actually or potentially believes and proceeds quite otherwise, why would his work and Adorno's be a much of a muchness? But on second thought, you probably mean that in the works by them that you mention above, both Adorno and Kelley donned significantly different sorts of intellectual "hats" in order to fit those particular tasks/situations. If that is what you meant, it seems to me that Adorno, for better or worse, only wore one such hat, though of course his thinking altered over time (as his head swelled?). About Kelley's work, I don't yet have enough info to have an opinion.

In any case, here's an Adorno passage that may clarify this IMO potentially significant difference (paradoxically so, perhaps, because typically for Teddy it's a bit clotted):

"Another ... already established scholar considered my analyses of light music as 'expert opinion.' He entered these [i.e. Adorno's "opinions"] on the side of reactions [to] rather than analysis of the actual object (i e., the music), which he wanted to exclude from analysis [because he thought of the music] as a mere stimulus."

Note: What inside [] is mine; what's inside () is Adorno's.

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Well, "closing [your] mother" would be painful. Sorry -- couldn't resist. :D

Hey, leave her out of it ... I am always keen to defend studies that are heavy on the context - if it's well researched - for two reasons: 1) often, it's the context we know less about - whereas a lot of writing that makes an effort to stick solely on 'the music' ends up being redundant in one way or another, offering endless adjectival or technical approximations of an aural experience which we've already had and which was infinitely richer, or else listing albums, tracks and events in a way that patronizes a clued-up audience like jazz's; 2) insisting that a music - any music - always be considered entirely separately from its social/historical contexts both impoverishes our understanding of how and why it came into being - which is not simply to say that social factor X produces music Y - and allows it to become elevated (reified, since we're doing Adorno) into a safely aestheticized object rather than human process, partially stripped of the humanity that shaped it, dispatched down the road to Starbucks soundtrack ... of course if you go too far you end up with the mirror image of that, where the 'context' itself becomes the reified object. But I don't think that's a reason to dismiss the method tout court. There are plenty of ways to skin a cat, so to speak, and there's no need for every book on every jazz hero to look the same, or be written by the same kinds of people. There are no 'correct' qualifications.

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it's not that we don't want to hear the details of the life, even the social context - the problem is that academic works invariably put me to sleep with contextualization, and too often reveal a certain cultural impoverishment - see my Sherry Tucker reference above. The ignorance of her position is so at odds with any actual experience of the music as to make it laughable. I love reading about the life, about what happened, when it happened, how it happened, who it happened with - I just cannot stand the boxing of musicians into social categories, as both symbol and cipher. Read John Szwed's bio of Sun Ra if you want to see how it can be done correctly - or read Beneath The Underdog, Death of a Bebop Wife, Tonight at Noon, Clyde Berhardt's book, to name just a few extremely informative biographical works, which are all about the life but devoid of academic posturing.

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There are plenty of ways to skin a cat, so to speak, and there's no need for every book on every jazz hero to look the same, or be written by the same kinds of people. There are no 'correct' qualifications.

Well, wait till you see (if we're lucky) Peter Pullman's Bud Powell bio. It's almost all "context," beyond what has ever been attempted in a jazz biography before AFAIK, and IMO it's amazing.

As you say, it's the way hatcha do it, but some ways (or perhaps better styles) of doing it really put my back up (to the point where I think that the actual intelligence/savvy/etc. of the writer can't redeem things, may even make the fairly well-done results more dangerous -- at times Scott DeVeaux's "The Birth of Bebop" gave me that feeling ), while other ways that seem basically right to me can still yield up a mess if the writer just isn't up to the task.

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Read John Szwed's bio of Sun Ra if you want to see how it can be done correctly - or read Beneath The Underdog, Death of a Bebop Wife, Tonight at Noon, Clyde Berhardt's book, to name just a few extremely informative biographical works, which are all about the life but devoid of academic posturing.

Er, thanks for the recommendations, I've seen it done correctly though ... (and if Beneath the Underdog is devoid of posturing, I'm a dutchman; besides, autobiography is not interchangeable with biography - if anything, it's biography's opposite). You're undoubtedly right about that argument of Tucker's, but you can't take that single passage as standing for 'academic' jazz studies.

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I said academic posturing, not posturing, a key difference - and I'm sorry, but Tucker's stuff is too damn typical of academic writing to be funny. I've read a lot of this stuff. Re the other, I am talking about the life of artists, and that can be described in many different ways, as bio or autobio; there is a difference in forms, but the ultimate aim is really the same.

Edited by AllenLowe
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Adorno, himself, was able to write Dialectic of the Enlightenment but also Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, both quite successfully. I don't see that being much different from Robin Kelley writing Freedom Dreams and then this Monk bio.

But on second thought, you probably mean that in the works by them that you mention above, both Adorno and Kelley donned significantly different sorts of intellectual "hats" in order to fit those particular tasks/situations. If that is what you meant, it seems to me that Adorno, for better or worse, only wore one such hat, though of course his thinking altered over time (as his head swelled?). About Kelley's work, I don't yet have enough info to have an opinion.

That's what I meant, yeah. I guess it didn't directly address your use of the Adorno quotes.

I've had a few drinks, so this might not be clear, but here's what I've been thinking. I agree that Paul Whiteman may have been incorrectly characterized as a particularly racist oppressor for the purpose of rhetoric by a number of scholars that aren't digging deep enough. Those folks should spend some more time here! For me, and perhaps for many of what you and Allen call the "New Jazz Studies" academics, this was made clear a long time ago with Art Hodes joking around about music critics, but the reason behind the shift was more clearly articulated decades ago, when Amiri Baraka suggested that people examine the attitudes behind the music, rather than just the music itself in his essay "Jazz and the White Critic." He said:

Usually the critic's commitment was first to his appreciation of the music rather than to his understanding of the attitude which produced it. This difference meant that the potential critic of jazz had only to appreciate the music, or what he thought was the music, and that he did not need to understand or even be concerned with the attitudes that produced it, except perhaps as a purely sociological consideration.

I think it is not appropriate in this instance to characterize Robin Kelley, and a number of the "New Jazz Scholars" that have been grouped in with him (interestingly many of whom are Black, although the examples of Tucker and Deveaux are exceptions), as examples of Adorno's famous idea of "regression of listening." Kelley pays close attention to the attitude behind it, and what that might mean for universal liberation. From what I know, Kelley has taken this project very personally, both in gratification and meaning, so that regressive label does not apply. From how I understand it, Kelley fits Glenn Gould's understanding of the "new listener:" one that is "no longer passively analytical: he is an associate whose tastes, preferences, and inclinations even now alter peripherally the experiences to which he gives attention." (From Gould, "The Prospects of Recording")

Now to bed!

Edited by zanonesdelpueblo
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I agree that people like Paul Whiteman has been incorrectly characterized as a particularly racist oppressor for the purpose of rhetoric among a number of scholars that aren't digging deep enough.

That's true, but I think it's changing. I know someone writing on precisely this Whiteman question right now; other academics (cough) are doing work trying to deal with these things as complex encounters between different and sometimes not fully compatible musical expectations, experiences, ideologies, competencies etc. - i.e., looking at musical life as thickly and problematically lived rather than (just) as a token of historical ignorance, condemned from a pretend contemporary enlightenment.

(Well, I can see I've already got my academic on this morning ... time to start work.)

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